Editor’s note: Geoffrey Woo and Michael Brandt are cofounders of Nootrobox, an e-commerce nootropics company.
Biohacking and transhumanist advances (including
nootropics, extended longevity, cybernetic implants, better behavioral
and genetic self-understanding) will materially advance our quality of
life and productivity in the coming decade, but we need to be thoughtful
about the potential social and ethical pitfalls as we transform. Google
Trends shows a marked uptick
in searches for “nootropics” and related biohacking fields, so now is
the time to have the conversation about the direction we’re headed.
Digital products and companies are not just changing the way we live our lives, but also playing larger and more influential roles in public policy and governance.
This trend of the technology industry driving broader social policy
will perhaps be even greater with biohacking companies as their product
innovations begin to alter and transform what it means to be human.
An equalizer
Biohacking is simply the next frontier in the drive to better ourselves. People will enhance themselves physically to have better bones, better eyes and better
resilience to disease, as well as attain an overall better standard of
living. More people will have access to their full potential. However
from an ethics perspective, there’s already worrying concerns about the
widening socio-economic gap around the world today; there’s an argument
that when only the wealthy have access, it further separates the haves
from the have-nots.
Bill McKibben,
a prominent critic of a hyper-segregated, Gattaca-esque version of the
future, cautions that biohacking technologies like genetic enhancement
“would take the gap in power, wealth, and education that currently
divides both our society and the world at large, and write that division
into our very biology.”
From a technology perspective, this bifurcation story just
hasn’t played out. Over and over again, we’ve seen new technologies
popularize and achieve economies of scale, and then quickly drop in
price and diffuse across all levels of society. Increasing market demand
leads to new research and production techniques that in the long run
drive down the price of fundamentally useful new devices and
technologies. 23andMe initially provided genetic reports for $299, and within several years were able to cut its price by two-thirds.
Research into nootropics and other biometric and
bio-enhancement technologies requires significant R&D investment and
innovative new methods of production and distribution. The cutting edge
of any tech is expensive, but prices come down with time. Biohacking
companies should follow the examples of Google Loon and Facebook’s Internet.org,
bringing basic technologies to the world as a service to society,
democratizing access and encouraging participation in the commerce of
the future.
If a tool or technology provides a positive return for
society at large, government subsidy may be a viable option, similar to
how national and local governments provide baseline health and vision
care, free education, computers in libraries, and Internet access in
public spaces.
More value per person
New forms of functional ingestables, including meal replacement products like Soylent and nootropic stacks produced by Nootrobox and DIY resources like Longecity and Peak Nootropics,
as well as quantified self-tracking tools like Fitbit, Android Wear and
the Apple Watch are already enabling us to better quantify and manage
the way we spend our 24 hours each day.
Technological advancement is expanding beyond our current
digital sensors and interfaces, and as we apply the hacker ethos to our
own bodies and minds to develop safe, cheap and accessible technologies,
we will see this value-per-worker ratio continue to rise.
New waves of technology, like the Industrial Revolution, or
the ubiquity of PCs and the Internet, have unlocked massive increases
in per-person productivity, and we will see this again with biohacking.
Groups of a dozen will be able to achieve feats that today would take
much larger groups and much longer timelines.
In a world with enhanced classmates and colleagues, the coercion to participate in biohacking enhancement is a valid concern. Bioethics researchers from Stanford and Harvard
have cautioned that “appropriate policy should prohibit coercion except
in specific circumstances for specific occupations, justified by
substantial gains in safety.”
If done responsibly, future enhancements will be viewed
much the same as past enhancements like literacy, flu shots and
eyeglasses. While there is indeed pressure to obtain eyeglasses if you
have subpar sight and want to function within normal society, it’s less
coercion and more opting-in.
Solving unknown unknowns
There are classes of problems we’re unable to solve or even
identify today due to our limited view of the world. What if you could hear color? What if we live long enough for
several careers across myriad disciplines? What if cognitive
enhancement technology enables more people to become engineers,
researchers, doctors and other highly valuable specialists?
J. Hughes of the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
cautions that biohacking will cause us to lose our sense of authentic
self, that we’ll have no “discrete, persistent selves, no ‘real me’,”
and that we’ll come out on the other side of biohacking as some
homogenized, bland and sterile form of humanity.
On the contrary, biohacking in practice is highly
personalized. Take SCUBA gear as an analogy. SCUBA allows us to navigate
outside our natural limitations, yet not everyone wants or will want
SCUBA gear. Others will want rear-facing ocular implants, augmented
memory capacities or other enhancement depending on their personal
disposition. Differences from one individual to the next
will be more pronounced than ever. We see this future promising a more
authentic life with more expression and a greater breadth of experience.
Human progress is taking
advancement into our own hands rather than leave it up to natural
selection and random mutations of our genome. Technology is a reflection
of that desire and ability to understand and manipulate our
surroundings beyond our biology. But it’s only in recent years that our
science, sensors and data processing are able to directly interface into
our minds and bodies. If the networked computer (mainframe, PC, and
mobile) were the dominant platform of innovation in the 20th century, the human will be that platform in the 21st.